pippin
Guest
This is depressing...
What are the main reasons games like this are no longer made?
Is there not a market besides me and a few others?
This style of game is, without a doubt, my favorite by a WIDE margin & they are no longer made?
WTF?
Yep, the market is too small, the games are not profitable enough. There are many reasons:
-Isometric RPGs are not good on consoles. It's a thing people like to complain about but it matters. This is a very PC specific style of gameplay that doesn't translate well on consoles.
-World of Warcraft. It's easy to forget about this now but at one point MMOs cannibalized pretty much the entire PC RPG market. There was this crazy gold rush where everyone thought MMOs were the only future of games and everyone was rushing to put out their WoW clones. All the other minor RPG projects were swept aside.
-Bioware. With Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, Bioware ushered the west into the age of the Cinematic RPG. The selling point of these games was not gameplay or depth, but cinematic presentation. They realized they didn't need hard combat, complex character classes and mechanics, or deep stories with meaningful choices. Just fancy graphics and a lot of voice acting with shot/reverse shot camera angles.
Bioware-style RPGs make a lot of money but they're expensive to make right so they essentially pushed a lot of smaller developers out of the business. They couldn't compete with Bioware's model so they gave up, or tried to play second fiddle (Obsidian).
and finally:
-Dungeons and Dragons sucks now. D&D 3rd edition sparked a resurgence of interest in D&D videogames. D&D 4th and 5th edition killed that interest. There were like a dozen games based on 3rd edition, and only one based on 4th edition (a crappy MMO!). D&D games are dead now because D&D is dead, Wizards of the Coast killed it.
Despite all that, we are seeing something of a top-down isometric RPG renaissance with Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, and Divinity Original Sin. These games aren't exactly what you want, but they're closer than a crappy MMO or a cinematic corridor shooter. Support these games and their developers and we'll make the RPG genre great again.
With the isometric thing, I think it depends. I guess the key difference comes in the form of mouse vs controller movement, which is the thing that hurts slower games the most.
The MMO craze had started a long time ago and in my opinion the game got big because of this, WoW just came to cash in on the hype of MMOs in general more than going for the fans of the RTS games.
Bioware always had dumbed down rpgs. They took like a half of DND rules out of Baldur's Gate, for instance.
DND does suck now because they don't want to market it to other people than just guys who already know DND, that is, the niche. When I was a kid DND was everywhere because the marketing targeted everything, all ages. There were cartoons, toys (not miniatures but actual toys), comics, etc., things kids might be interested about. In fact this is how I became aware of DND, and wanted to get my hands on everything DND related because it was all so cool to me. That doesn't happen anymore.
The Bioware point shines a light on what is happening to every entertainment industry right now, it's funnier and easier to do stuff like cosplay and generally just aping something that was already given to you instead of creating new stuff. It's very sad and I hate fan communities because of this now.